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The applications for 3-D printing
are being driven in a new direction.

If you were planning a cross-country road trip, how much would
you budget for gas? For Cody and Tyler Kor and their dog, Cupid,
they'll be figuring just 10 gallons each way for the 2,900-mile
journey from New York to San Francisco and back. And Hint: it has
a little something to do with 3-D printing.

The brothers will be following in the footsteps of car enthusiast
Horatio Nelson Jackson and mechanic Sewall K. Crocker, who made
the same journey with their dog Bud in 1903. It took Jackson and
Crocker more than 63 days and 800 gallons of fuel to accomplish
the first cross-country automobile journey in a 20-hp Winton. The
Kors, by contrast, have planned their journey to take a bit more
than 44 hours, allowing for human and canine potty breaks, in a
considerably more futuristic vehicle: the largely 3-D printed,
three-wheeled electric car dubbed the Urbee 2.

Cody and Tyler are part of a team led by their father, Jim Kor,
who is president of Kor Ecologic and one of the key designers
of the incredibly efficient, aerodynamic vehicle. Its name
comes from the three core tenets that went into its design:
urban, electric and ethanol. The Ecologic team's goal was to
create a small car designed for urban use, powered by an
electric motor and an ethanol-fueled combustion engine.

The team hoped to enter the Automotive X Prize competition in
2009, but ran into a snag when they were ready to create a
prototype. The fiberglass molding they had originally planned to
use for their prototype proved to be too time-consuming to work
within their schedule, and they were forced to withdraw from the
competition. The team turned to an unlikely source for a
solution: 3-D printing.

Working with 3-D printing company Stratasys, they created a
1/6th-scale model, and then finally a full-scale prototype. The
three-wheeled car weighs about 1,200 pounds and features a
single-cylinder 7-hp engine that uses either diesel or ethanol
and networked batteries to drive two electric motors, giving it
the equivalent of 16 hp and a max speed of about 70 mph. Steel
tubing in the chassis and framing helps make the car strong
enough to meet or exceed road-worthy safety standards.

Most intriguing, more than 50 percent of the car is 3-D printed.
"Everything you typically see and touch on the car, as you drive
the car, will be 3-D printed," Kor was recently
quoted saying in Popular Mechanics. That method of
production makes the Urbee 2 more affordable -- the sticker
price will likely be between $16,000 and $50,000 depending on
how many are produced yearly.

Even more important to Kor and his team, though, is the fact that
3-D printing allows the Urbee 2 to be manufactured with minimal
environmental impact.

"Designing for sustainability can arguably be stated to be
humanity's biggest and most important challenge of the coming
century," says Kor. "It's something we absolutely need to get
right."

What crazy apps and gadgets have you come across
lately? Let us know by emailing us at
FarOutTech@entrepreneur.com or by telling us in the comments
below.